Normativity and Productivism: Ableist Intelligence? A Degrowth Analysis of AI Sign Language Translation Tools for Deaf People

TL;DR

This paper critically examines AI sign language translation tools, highlighting their biases, cultural insensitivity, and the normative effects that marginalize deaf communities, framing AI as ableist.

Contribution

It offers a degrowth perspective on AI sign language tools, emphasizing the need for inclusive, culturally aware approaches that resist standardization and technocratic domination.

Findings

AI systems are built from biased data without deaf community input

Sign language AI models perpetuate normative and ableist biases

Current tools alienate and marginalize deaf users instead of empowering them.

Abstract

Sign languages, of any geographical or accentual variation, understandably face continuous scrutiny under the ever present popularity of verbal dictation and audism. Through this, many potential problems arise with the current lack of accessible communication for those who rely on such sign languages for essential conversation. Such AI systems regularly take the form of recognition and interpretation models, designed to provide seamless and accurate translation. In reality these systems are built from biased data and created without any input from deaf communities. Such models are widely used and accepted by their hearing counterparts who remain ignorant to the inherent culture, semantics and colloquial language present in gestural language systems. This phenomenon is best analysed under the scope of The Technological System and Technological bluff by Ellul. Indeed, what is at play here is the standardization of language by technicians into what can be captured by technique: data, statistics, a mathematical language. For that AI technique to exist, sign language must be rationalized, in a search for profit that annihilates the conditions for communication and fails to capture the human experience of the deaf person. By that process, it presents normative effects, creating a model of Man, standardized, massified, and who has to adapt to the tool and technical milieu instead of the other way around, which we assume should have been the goal of such a technology. Technique thus reshapes what it means to be human, to submit deaf people to the goals of productivity and efficiency. In doing so, it exhibits clear counter productivity, alienating instead of emancipating, isolating instead of nourishing human relationships. Therefore this paper argues for the idea of AI as Ableist Intelligence, as such systems seek to emphasise the humiliated and marginalised nature of sign.